Archive for April, 2012

As I came into the office this morning I saw Gary Habermas and we spoke for twenty or so minutes about his recent debate in New Orleans against Michael Shermer, Vic Stenger, and another atheist (which will be available down the road by Fortress Press.) Dr. Habermas then came and briefly spoke in the class I assist with and promoted the philosophy department, the philosophy and apologetics clubs, etc., and mentioned a few resources on his website. There are a few free books, chapters from books, and his dissertation, which are available in electronic form. These resources include:

The claim is that all religions have their miracles, so what makes Christianity’s miracles true and other religions’ false?

Not all religious teach miracles and the Jewish-Christian religions are the only traditions that claim to prove its teachings through miracles.

In all cases of miracles, no miracles have the historical evidence like the gospel miracles.

Christianity’s miracles are religiously significant. Jesus’ miracles occurred at the climax of his unparalleled life.

Religio-historical context distinguishes miracles from physical anomalies. When a scientific anomaly occurs it is usually assumed that some unknown natural factors are interfering, so that the law is neither violated nor revised.

Any affirmation of counterfactuals does nothing if it is incompatible with biblical teaching. The Bible acknowledges that God uses counterfactuals to achieve His will and that He knows the truth-value to hypothetical propositions. An example of this would be in 1 Samuel 23.6-10. This passage accounts for David’s inquiry to the Lord by means of a divining device called an ephod (which gave a “yes” or “no” answer). David thus flees the city of Keilah so the predictions do not come true. What the device had predicted to David was not simple foreknowledge (“Saul/the men of Keilah will do X”), by hypothetical knowledge (“If David stays, then Saul/the men of Keilah will do X”). The answer given by the ephod were correct answers, even though the events did not come to pass, since the answers were indicative of what would happen under certain circumstances.[1]

Another example may be found in Jeremiah’s prophecy to King Zedekiah:

Then Jeremiah said to Zedekiah, “Thus says the Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel, ‘If you will indeed go out to the officers of the king of Babylon, then you will live, this city will not be burned with fire, and you and your household will survive. ‘But if you will not go out to the officers of the king of Babylon, then this city will be given over to the hand of the Chaldeans; and they will burn it with fire, and you yourself will not escape from their hand'” (Jer. 38.17-18).

There seem to be good objections raised against empiricism and inferentially justified beliefs:

(A) That we seldom if ever consciously infer propositions about objects from propositions about experiences.

(B) That most people, if challenged as to their justification for believing propositions about the external world, would seldom if ever offer as their reasons or evidence propositions about experiences.

(C) That it is quite meaningless, that it makes no sense to search for evidence justifying a belief in the existence of a physical object that is before one under optimum conditions of perception.

Certainly, (A) may be true but is agreeably not critical to the empiricist’s defense. Both (B) and (C) may be true or false to a certain degree but is hardly relevant to the validity of an empiricist’s foundationalism. The concern is the logical order of justification rather than psychological or historical order.

I’ve provided a list of alleged contradictions in the New Testament from a file I’ve found floating around the internet. This is so you know what someone is talking about when this comes up in discussion. Some of them had explanations that were blatantly obvious and weren’t problematic at all but I’ve saved some interesting one’s for your consideration. Even so, some of these are a bit easy to harmonize. However, don’t be so quick to lay down a Christian trump card. Carefully consider what’s going on and work through it. I do affirm biblical inerrancy and I would recommend several books to address the issues of such alleged contradictions:

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he had the honesty and courage to take his own miedicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone thorugh the whole of human experience, from the trivial irrtations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in dsiagrce and thought it well worthwhile.

From Dorothy Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Eerdmans, 1969), 14.

What if it were the case that justification of our beliefs in propositions describing physical objects is always inferential and that it is always from propositions about the nature of our experiences that such inferences are made.? If this is true, there are two conditions that must be satisfied concerning inferential belief in physical objects:

(1) Statements about experience must count as reasons or evidence for statements about objects.
(2) Statements about experience must in some, no doubt rather obscure, sense be accepted by those who make statements about objects.

Maybe there’s reason to doubt (1) and (2) by simply suggesting that that it is not always the case that most people are always in the “appropriate, sophisticated, phenomenological frame of mind.” This is certainly true to an extent; so let us refer to this handicap as H. It may be the case person S is intoxicated with alcohol and his phenomenological apprehension may be malfunctioning or that S realizes that his phenomenological apprehension of the external world is not as it should be and is capable of recognizing malfunction.

As advocated by St. Anselm, God is a maximally perfect being. If ignorance is an imperfection, all things being equal [according to Ockham’s razor], then it is greater to be knowledgeable. To prevent initial detractions from the classical definition of omniscience, omniscience should be understood as knowing all truths.

O. For any agent x, x is omniscient= def. For every statement s, if s is true, then x knows that s and does not believe that not-s.[1]

If there are truths about future contingents, God, as an omniscient being must know these truths. Since there are truths about the future, that is to say, since statements about future contingents are either true or false, and they are not all false, God must therefore know all truths about the future, which is to say He knows future-tense facts; He knows what will happen.[2] One may try to avoid this reasoning by contending that future-tense statements are neither true nor false, so that there are no facts about the future. Since the future does not exist, it is claimed that the respective future-tense statements cannot be true or false, simply without truth.[3]

Scripture urges us to behold heaven and earth, birds and flowers and lilies, in order that we may see and recognize God in them. “Life up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these.” Is. 40.26. Scripture does not reason in the abstract. It does not make God the conclusion of a syllogism, leaving it to us whether we think the argument holds or not. But it speaks with authority. Both theologically and religiously it proceeds from God as the starting point.

We receive the impression that belief in the existence of God is based entirely upon these proofs. But indeed that would be “a wretched faith, which, before it invokes God, must first prove his existence.” The contrary, however, is the truth… Of the existence of self, of the world around us, of logical and moral laws, etc., we are so deeply convinced because of the indelible impressions which all these things make upon our consciousness that we need no arguments or demonstration. Spontaneously,altogether involuntarily: without an constraint or coercion, we accept that existence.